Writers who open up about how a piece of music works for them might talk about feelings, memories, a tug at the heartstrings engendered by a clever turn of phrase, a song that reminds them of when they were young. But sometimes tracks don't remind us of anything, they just do things to us. When you're talking about music that works as sound above narrative, you're entering the realm of cause and effect and brain processes.

In the past year I've worked part-time in food service, and sometimes I'll pass the time thinking about how my brain works when receiving orders. I'll hear words and turn them into muscle movements without thinking about what the sounds mean. And my brain, in the name of efficiency, only stores the words for a few seconds. If someone asks me a question after the order is given but before my muscles execute their instructions, the word is gone and the order has to be repeated. My brain is just a hopper in this case, a way station between the words spoken by the customers and the movements performed by my arms.

Something different happens when I'm passively listening to music. I've never been able to read and listen to music with English words simultaneously. My brain keeps getting stuck on what it's hearing and has trouble processing what it's reading. The old walk-and-chew-gum thing. And I wonder if I'm partly drawn to instrumental electronic music because I can put it on and read a book. It's interesting how well certain kinds of music can be absorbed even without paying any direct attention.

Late last year a little device popped up that encapsulated everything Brian Eno was talking about when he described ambient as music that "must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." You've probably heard about it: the Buddha Machine, designed by Beijing-based sound artists Christian Virant and Zhang Jian, who work together as FM3. A piece of plastic about the size of a pack of cigarettes, the Buddha Machine plays nine different loops of electronic music through a tiny speaker, each cycling on forever until you switch loops or turn the machine off.

I've never heard music as good for reading as the Buddah Machine. It has an uncanny knack of filling that space in my brain that has absolutely nothing to do with words, without requiring any additional energy. It's not bad for late-night walks either. I might go through two or three loops for five minutes or so at a time as my dog Rudy and I trek through the dim alley that bisects my block, me keeping an eye out for shady characters and him keeping a nose out for potentially tasty garbage. Depending on the track that's playing, the Buddha Machine can have a calming affect or add a faint layer of anxiety. It tints the atmosphere more than coloring it.

The Buddha Machine is pretty much a perfect little device, making a very modest claim and doing what it advertises brilliantly. The idea of a dedicated sound-making machine is tremendously inspiring, especially in the age of digital information. You've got the endless promise of purely electronic music with the tactile pleasure of industrial design. And the Buddha Machine feels good in your hand, wants to be tucked in a pocket, is easy to lay on a desk and angle toward you went you want to give iTunes a rest. The cheap speaker and cheaper amp do their own part to give the noise its character.

I've owned one previous noise-making machine but it couldn't hold a candle to this; at a garage sale a decade ago I picked up a little device that allowed you to choose from a few different kinds of white noise "Rain" or "Waves" or "Waterfall", all of which sounded pretty much the same. But each of these nine loops has its own vibe, from a cushiony puff of feedback to a clanging tumble of plucked guitars.

If the Buddha Machine is perfect marriage of idea, programming, and design, it's having a rougher go of it as an inspiration for the creation of more traditional music. Two records out in the last two months are based around sounds sampled from the Buddha Machine and then arranged into tracks. Jukebox Buddha,from the tremendously underrated German label Staubgold, contains 15 solicited tracks from a fine cast including Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Thomas Fehlmann, Jan Jelinek, and Sun City Girls. All were created with the Buddha Machine and most also use other instruments.

Though all the tracks use the device as a source, there's really not much connecting the pieces on Jukebox Buddha to the machine or to each other. They're mostly a random smattering of abstract electronic pieces that happen to have a few of the same sounds coursing through. Alog's "A Dragon Lies Listening" is perhaps my favorite track, as it uses voices in a really odd way that attempt to mimic the drones of the machine. SunnO)))'s contribution is also interesting, probably since it lets the machine run with only minor tweaks and is also the longest at 10 minutes, giving a taste of the endlessness of the original loops. It's a good record, but there's something unsatisfying about it.

Robert Henke, best known for his techno as Monolake, also contributes to Jukebox Buddha and was so taken with the possibilities in sampling the device he built an entire album, Layering Buddha, out of his experiments. It's a very solid album of glacial drone, miles better than the similar Signal to Noise record he released a couple years back, but I'm still not getting anything essential of the Buddha Machine out of it. The sounds could have come from anywhere.

It makes sense that all these musicians were inspired by the simple beauty of the Buddha Machine, but something essential is lost in sampling the sounds in arranging them to fit into a track. There's a spirit in this little box that extends beyond just the material used to make the loops. Without the elegance of the overall design they're just sounds, ones not all that different from those electronic musicians are making every day. FM3 released a proper CD called Hou Guan Yin a couple months back that's better than either of the proper Buddha Machine records, and comes closer to its essence. From the textures you can hear the sculptors of the Buddha Machine at work, but their music retains an appealing loose-ends approach, keeping in the spirit of the steady-state loops.

So the Buddha Machine remains a singular tool. I'm thinking that a huge part of its appeal also comes from the anti-mind character of endless loops, the thing that ties in with the brain's non-thinking states. Consciousness is about moment-to-moment change; endless loops are about flow, part of the mind turning off, that thing yoga practitioners are going for when they let loose with an "Om." The ego of the composer is found in the changes, so maybe an inanimate box running on its own becomes detached, something like an individual. It's fascinating how once you pull the sounds out of the thing and insert them into a piece of time-based sound, presented on a CD the way music always is, the result ceases to be special. Which says something about the power objects still have in this day and age. I guess we're not done with physical reality just yet.